Gerd Baumann - The Multicultural Riddle_ Rethinking National, Ethnic and Religious Identities (

The Multicultural Riddle

with its own particular rights. In this way, affirmative action comes to affirm precisely that which civil rights were supposed to overcome: boundaries between, and a strengthened sense of identity within, ethnic or religious communities. This does not mean that one has to be against affirmative action. What it shows, however, is that the logic of civil rights and the logic of community rights, including affirmative action, are two different logics. There is no way of solving the multicultural riddle if we fudge the differences and treat one sort of rights as “bascially the same” as the other two. This conflation however, is a very fashionable fallacy. Spokespersons for the rights of religious communities appeal to their believers’ faith in civil rights, spokespersons for ethnic rights translate their message into religious rights, and those who speak for a civil rights approach sell civil rights as the way toward ethnic or religious community rights. Time and again, it appears politically convenient, both for majorities and among minorities, to vacillate between the different logics. There are good reasons for this, for it makes everyone’s arguments more elastic and renders compromises more flexible. At the same time, however, it can lead to the most paradoxical and counterproductive results.

The clearest examples of such a strategy of confusion are found in Europe, rather than in America, for two contradictory reasons. To start with, European states have a much longer history of ethnic or religious discrimination despite formal declarations of legal equality. Racism and communalism went on long after the formal recognition of equal civil rights for all. In America, by contrast, civil equality was denied even in principle to African Americans until 1862 (and in effect, much longer) and denied to Native Americans until 1911 (in effect, again, much longer). In most of Europe, such systematic exclusions from civil rights turned more and more unpractical in a climate of competitive industrialization. In fact, some states that oppressed their minorities lost their best entrepreneurial elites to more liberal states. One may think of the

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“I Have a Dream”—but Who Is It For?

French Huguenot refugees who were outlawed for the second time in 1685, proceded to emigrate in large numbers, and soon contributed enormously to the economies of Holland and Prussia, as well as America. Conversely, however, and this is the second reason, present-day European states cannot solve their current problems of inequality by simply reinforcing civil rights because most of their ethnic and religious minorities today are recent arrivals, and thus not citizens at all.

Virtually all European states, with the main exception of Great Britain, replicate this constellation of disadvantaged minorities that do not hold national citizenship and thus civil rights. The unification of the European Community has alleviated some of these problems by encouraging member-states to treat each other’s nationals like their own, regardless of the member-state from which they come. Yet these multinational legal agreements remain limited, and at any rate they do not affect the far more disadvantaged minorities that hail from beyond the European Community—Eastern Europe and the Balkans, North Africa and Turkey, Indochina and South Asia. To remedy systematic inequalities is thus again a matter of addressing and targeting these nonnationals as ethnic or religious communities, instead of as citizens. To get a feel for the resulting contradictions, it may be useful to throw a brief glance at two cases.

Probably the oldest and most odd example of fudging civil rights and religious community rights is found in the Netherlands from around 1600 to the present (van Rooden 1996). At the risk of oversimplifying four hundred years of a complicated history, I shall accentuate some key points of immediate multicultural interest. Around 1600, the Netherlands was the center of the capitalist world, with Amsterdam counting a third of world trade as its own and a third of its inhabitants as immigrants. There, the largely selfgoverning cities, such as Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Haarlem, faced citizenries of equal civic standing, but administered

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The Multicultural Riddle

welfare rights and economic perks according to their citizens’ religious communities. Some were treated better than others, but none was left entirely without a stake in the system. Even the so-called sects of Armenians and Anabaptists, as well as the Jewish community, were awarded welfare rights, and sometimes civic perks, on the basis of their religious affiliations. In the course of time (ca. 1600 to 1800), the citizens of Holland grew used to the idea that they interacted with their cities and even their state on the basis of their religious identities. This was vastly better than the oppression of religious minorities elsewhere, and it probably spurred the famous “Dutch tolerance.” However, just when Holland should have started to become a modern state (ca. 1850–1900), the state-sponsored habit of religious communalism came back with a vengeance: The modernizing state was squeezed into a coma by a pincer movement between what might be called the religious right and the religious left—the Catholics, who had had a rough deal in the past, and the ultra-Protestants, who feared they might get one in the future. For the formative one hundred years of industrialization and nation-building (ca. 1850–1950), the state elite of the Netherlands was either unable or unwilling to deal with its citizens as citizens. Instead, it worked like a trust bank for three religious communities or “pillars” of national society: Catholics, so-called Orthodox Protestants, and the neither-nors who had to organize as if they, too, were a religious community. This dissolution of civil politics into a religious “pillarization” ran out of steam in the 1960s, but it has an influence on Dutch citizens’ ideas about multiculturalism even now. The largest groups of nonnationals are from Turkey and from Morocco, and they have precious little in common except that both groups are Muslim. For most native Dutch, however, the problem of multiculturalism has become a problem of how to integrate or pacify Muslims as such. The upshot is simple: It is Islam as such that most

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“I Have a Dream”—but Who Is It For?

citizens now see as the multicultural problem and most conservatives see as a threat to Dutch values.3

The British example of conflating civil rights and community rights is remarkable because it is largely unnecessary. Britain is unique in Western comparison in that almost all its minority citizens are entitled to the status of nationals and thus share the same right to equal civil rights. Yet strangely and paradoxically, it is Britain that has gone furthest on the path away from a civil rights approach. While this has historical reasons,4 it is nonetheless an astonishing example of what happens when civil rights give way to ethnic or religious rights. Britain has an institution called “The Muslim Parliament,” as if Muslims were not represented at Westminster, the famed “Mother of Parliaments”; its governing Labour Party has a special “Black Section,” as if there were a white and a nonwhite version of social democracy; and Britain has local authorities that involve temples and mosques in administering the naturalization of overseas migrants into British citizens (Baumann 1995b). None of these things are bad by themselves if one takes a closer look, and every country has, so far, been stuck with its own national multiculturalism, as we shall see in chapters 3 and 4. Yet what these details show is the opposite of a color-blind, culture-blind, or religion-blind—and thus secular—modern state.

To sum up, both of these European examples of putting community rights in the place of civil rights are, in their own ways, examples of affirmative action, even when they date several hundred years back. Ethnic or religious community rights are thus nothing new in modern states, but they are clearly something radically different from civil rights. It may matter little to the person whether she enjoys a right as a citizen, as an ethnically distinguishable person, or as a member of some congregation or other. A right is a right—who cares where it comes from? Yet what is right about a right? For a multiculturalist, as well as for a social scientist, there is no right in claiming a right unless it is the same

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The Multicultural Riddle

right for all. It may not suit us to distinguish different kinds of rights. To solve the multicultural riddle, however, the differences are crucial, and conflating these differences will not help anyone. Yet as we have seen, this strategy of confusion is popular and politically useful. It promises everyone to have the best of all three worlds, the civic, the ethnic, and the religious; but like all political fallacies, it is most useful to those who have power already.

Throwing a more thoughtful glimpse back at King’s dream, we must choose, now, who is to share this dream and in what capacity we, or they, can make it come true. Are we to share the dream as nationals regardless of color and creed, culture and ethnic identity? In that case, our solution to the multicultural riddle will require the forging of a common civil culture, but that civil culture will be a national culture, and the forging will require assimilation on the part of all, especially newcomers. Or are we to share the dream as members of our own particular ethnic community, regardless of whether we wish to be stereotyped as community people or ethnics? In that case, we risk being singled out as problem groups or as pampered minorities, and we also risk the wrath of social control as it is exercised within any community based on conformity. Are we to share the dream as members of a religious faith, regardless of who defines what we must believe in and who can rule us out as half-believers, heretics, or free-to-shoot apostates? Even if the excesses of enforcing ethnic or religious conformity were rare (and they are not!), our sole reliance on community rights would mean a state without a unifying civil culture. The choices are fundamental, because the three logics of equality are mutually exclusive. This does not mean, of course, that there is one right path and two wrong ones. What matters is, I suggest, to recognize the choices and distinguish between them, so as to translate the multicultural dream into a process of multicultural thinking. To speed up this rethinking, we need to identify the

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“I Have a Dream”—but Who Is It For?

poles of power that are involved in the multicultural project. From what has been said already, there must be at least three of them, and there is a fourth, our conception of culture, that sits at the center of that triangle of powers.

Notes

1.I say “present-day” civil rights because the philosophy of civil rights in its earlier modern forms tended to turn a blind eye to differences of color as well as gender. The most lucid discussion of how we have come to think of so many desiderata in the public sphere as “rights” is given in Louis Henkin’s The Age of Rights (1990).

2.The quote continues: “and with equal natural right, in the same manner as if posterity had been continued by CREATION instead of GENERATION,…and consequently every child born into the world must be considered as deriving its existence from God. [Because] the world is as new to him as it was to the first man that existed, and his natural right is of the same kind” (Conway 1967, 304–05; capitals in original; italics mine). In other words, Paine argues, all religions view every child as a creation by God, rather than a creation by sex (“generation”), because it knows as little about the world as did the first human being created by God. We know of no such society, but the trick is well played by putting words like “consequently” and “as if” in the wrong places.

3.This development is further encouraged by the fact that the term “Muslim” can function as a code word to distinguish the more recent immigrants of Mediterranean origins from those who originate from the former Dutch colonies of Suriname and Indonesia. Although the latter comprise many Muslims, too, it is the former who are usually talked of as “the Muslim immigrants.” To call them after their religion may serve to scale down a prevailing feeling that they are more distant from Dutch ways than the former colonials, and it may thus lower the odds in any situation of conflict. I owe these observations to Alex Strating.

4.Among these historical reasons are the absence of both a written constitution and a bill of civil rights. The paradox also becomes more understandable as soon as one realizes the difference between

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The Multicultural Riddle

nationality and citizenship. The British state, inheritor to an unmanageably populous Empire, proceeded to institute five different kinds of citizenship, each with its own package of civil rights. The American state has done likewise by inventing different kinds of citizenship for different categories of citizens, mainly depending on their countries of origin. For defenders of a unified civil rights approach, it must be imperative to counteract such hierarchies of citizenship. I owe these remarks to Marie-Benedicte Dembour.

Further Reading

Dembour, Marie-Benedicte. 1996. “Human Rights Talk and Anthropological Ambivalence: The Particular Contexts of Universal Claims.” Pp. 18–39 in Inside and Outside the Law, ed. O.Harris. London: Routledge.

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2

From Dreaming to Meaning: The Multicultural Triangle

National Culture, Ethnic Culture, Religion

as Culture

A philosopher was asked what the Earth rested on. “A tortoise,” said the philosopher.

“And what does the tortoise rest on?” “A table.”

“And what does the table rest on?” “An elephant.”

“And what does the elephant rest on?” “Don’t be inquisitive.” (H.D.F.Kitto 1951, 176)

The method we adopt…consists of the following operations:

i.define the phenomenon under study as a relation between two or more terms, real or supposed;

ii.construct a table of possible permutations between these terms;

iii.take this table as the general object of analysis which, at this level only, can yield necessary connections, [with] the empirical phenomenon considered at the beginning being only one possible combination among others. (Levi-Strauss 1964, 16)

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The Multicultural Riddle

THE FIRST CORNER of the multicultural triangle is the state, in particular, the so-called modern state or Western nation-state. It is the governing elite of the state, as well as its hegemonic media and its dominant civil culture, that determine the life chances of most people, be they counted as majorities or minorities through one criteria or another. It is precisely these powers, in fact, that often determine who is regarded as a minority and on what construction of difference, be it ethnic or religious, civic or sexual, historic or mythical. Although the choice of this starting point may seem obvious, it is nonetheless useful to cast a very brief glance behind the facade of this entity. The Western nation-state is a peculiar amalgam of two seemingly irreconcilable philosophies: rationalism, that is, the appeal to purpose and efficiency; and romanticism, that is, the appeal to feelings as the basis of action.

On the one hand, the modern nation-state grew out of the economic and geopolitical necessities of early modern Europe. From around 1400, Europeans faced expanding populations with non-expanding production technologies. To relieve their population pressure and acreage limitations, they tried territorial warfare for the first few hundred years. Within Europe, this was a zero-sum game: The continent grew no bigger, and all available resources were wasted in an endless succession of mutual wars. The second strategy was colonizing the lands overseas, and it paid the bills for about two hundred more years. Yet even this escape route came to an end. Both World War I (1914–1918) and even World War II (1939–1945) can be seen as European powers fighting amongst themselves about the rest of the world. American governments, who had a different vision of colonialism, managed to dismantle the old European-owned empires within fifteen years (ca. 1945–1960) and substituted a new free-trade imperialism, or “Coca-Cola globalization,” in its place. What happened in between, however, was a new cult of the Westernstyle nation-state as the ultimate entity to shape the world. This cult is known as the doctrine of sovereignty, the foundation myth

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From Dreaming to Meaning: The Multicultural Triangle

of every state since then and until now. Nation-state sovereignty is the doctrine of advancing economic expansion by establishing a territorial monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. It is the state alone that launches wars and draws peace treaties, controls police forces and prisons, and regulates when a citizen may carry arms. By using this monopoly on force to protect, control, and expand economic activity, the state could function, or be seen to function in due time, as the most rational provider of public welfare (de Swaan 1988).

On the other hand, another source of the modern West arises from a romantic vision of ethnicity as the basis of state making and nation building. The wellsprings of this romanticism reach back to the eighteenth century and are often tagged with the name of the philosopher Herder, whom we will meet later. The idea is simple enough: The world is populated by peoples, and each of these has its culture. The final expression of this cultural unity is the making of a state, an act that promotes the cultural or ethnic group to the status, some say liberty, of a nation. The simplicity of this view is seductive, and we will come back to it to dismantle its dangerous errors.

The second pole of multiculturalism is the idea that ethnicity is the same as cultural identity. The idea of ethnicity has one great advantage over that of “the state”: No one needs abstract thinking to know what it is. It is roots—where I come from, what makes me who I am, in one phrase, natural identity. Or so it seems. Familiar as these intuitions are, they take a serious battering in rethinking the multicultural dream. Ethnic absolutism is neither politically useful nor even tenable as an analysis. Even social scientists, who are not known for their radicalism, have been dismantling it for nearly fifty years.1 What, then, is wrong with ethnicity as one’s only identity, or ethnic identity as an absolute?

Taken at face value, the idea of ethnicity appeals, first and foremost, to blood from the past. It invokes biological ancestry and then claims that present-day identities follow from this

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